Building (Even) Better Campaigns with Facebook Topic Data

Here’s a question none of us would mind having to answer: What do you do when you are riding the crest of one of the year’s most successful multi-channel marketing campaigns? It’s certainly a nice problem to have. If you keep running the same content are you resting on your laurels? If you move on are you consigning all that great work to the dustbin of history?

One consumer goods brand had to make this choice and they decided to build new content that iterated on their success. However, they wanted to make sure that they were improving on the good foundations they had laid and not falling victim to the law of diminishing returns. To do this they needed to understand how people were engaging with their campaign and with comparable themes to the ones they had used. They hoped to discover whether there were themes that would resonate even better with their target audience for future campaigns. So they decided that Facebook – which has over a billion daily active users, spread across all demographic groups – would be a fantastic representation of their audience.

In order to get deep insights into audience engagement on Facebook, the brand had to use Facebook topic data. They collected Facebook posts and engagements (likes, comments and shares) about the campaign, but they also collected posts about the theme of the campaign and other similar concepts – such as strength or confidence – and they were able to classify the data by these ideas. The scale of engagement on Facebook is so large that seven million interactions were collected in the first week. From this huge dataset the brand were able to derive a number of audience and creative insights.

By looking at the topics that were being associated with the theme of the campaign the brand were able to identify a number of sports, teams and athletes that people on Facebook were engaging with in relation to the campaign theme. Filtering these results by topic data’s rich demographics allowed them to home in on the sports, teams and athletes that were resonating most with their target market. This insight will help them build better creative next time by including the sports that their target market associate with the campaign theme and also points to potential partnerships or sponsorships with the relevant teams and athletes.

Thanks to the depth of information on topics and links available in the data, the brand was able to dig into the events and activities that were associated with the campaign themes by their target group. One subject that featured heavily was charity, in particular charity runs.

The final discovery was that there were indeed themes that were resonating much more strongly with their target audience than the one they had used for their, already successful, campaign. The ideas of “pride” and “determination” both featured much more often in the data as a whole and specifically with the demographic group that is the brand’s primary market.

This multi-layered analysis meant that the brand was able to get insight to inform not only their creative, but also their strategy. The data was pointing them to a next generation of the campaign incorporating the concept of pride, adding particular sports to the creative and including sponsorship of charity runs and/or athletes into the marketing mix.